It's no secret that I have a love/hate relationship with developing for OSGi platforms with Maven. The giant divide between "all-in" Tycho projects (which limit your options with normal Maven features) and trying to bolt on OSGi support in an otherwise-normal project creates an array of problems big and small.

Some of those hurdles would be difficult to bridge, such as any automated tests that want to test the proper functioning of OSGi services. However, not all projects need that - in the case of Darwino, for example, deployment to Domino is a secondary consideration in the Maven project, and so a Darwino app doesn't use Tycho for its packaging or testing. By jumping through a few hoops, we've gotten those projects to the point where they can emit a p2-formatted update site for use in OSGi, and that can be imported into a Domino NSF-based update site.

There's a minor caveat, though: because those update sites don't know about p2 formatting, you can't use the "Import Update Site" action, instead having to use "Import Features", which leaves the imported features in the "(Not Categorized)" group. This isn't a huge problem, but it's one that's easily fixed, so I wrote a small tool to do just that.

I've created a small open-source project called p2sitexml-maven-plugin, the purpose of which is to generate the site.xml file expected by Notes from a p2 repository generated by other means, such as the p2-maven-plugin. This can be included in a Maven build like so: